


spiderweb

by foxlives



Category: Stoker (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:51:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives/pseuds/foxlives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blood is blood is blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	spiderweb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fightingtheblankpage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightingtheblankpage/gifts).



Summer heat hangs in the air, crawls up the walls to cling to the curve of the ceiling. You're lying on your back on the kitchen floor, and your skin isn't thick enough to protect your bones from bruising on the hardwood. You think you can feel it, the blood welling under your skin, the purple marks radiating from each exquisite point of pain. Your heels, your tailbone, your hips. Those are your shoulderblades, growing bruises like wings. Your elbows, your wrists. The back of your skull is aching sore.

When you were little, you sliced one of the butcher knives in the kitchen across your palm. You were fascinated by the line of blood you drew up from your skin, shining and red. You were fascinated by the feeling. You had never really been in pain before.

Your mother screamed, when she found you. Your father took you hunting for the first time.

*

This is your mother's house, and her mother's before her. Her great-great-grandmother came here from Europe, married a successful businessman, and had him build her a house.

You think, that was awfully practical. Your mother grew up here, so you did too. Your father was fine with moving in. He never liked his own family home, anyway.

Your father doesn't like much about his family. He always refused to visit them, to talk about them. You have a whole phantom branch of your family, there but not really.

The boiler has had to be replaced six times, since that great-great-great-grandmother. Pluming has been installed, and reinstalled. But the house is still standing, walls torn out to put in wiring and then replastered, closets gutted to create bathrooms. The house has had everything pulled out of it and put back in, new and better, but it hasn’t fallen down yet. You love this house more than you love most things.

*

As a girl, you'd lay flat on your back in your bed big enough to drown in, and you'd listen to your mother and your father walking around underneath you. The house would creak, and you'd gasp. Sometimes you'd lay there until dawn, and you'd go to school the next day bleary-eyed and exhausted.

Sometimes your mother would slip inside your room at two, three o'clock in the morning, and lay down next to you. She'd have just gotten home from a party, still in a nice dress and heels. She'd smell like wine and hairspray, the caked scent of makeup and cigarette smoke. You'd keep your eyes closed. But she'd know you were awake and you'd known you were awake, and she'd fall asleep next to you and you'd fall asleep, too, long after her breathing had evened out and her mouth fallen slightly open.

It's the best memory you have of your mother. Driving away from her, from the house, that's what you're thinking about.

*

Your mother has always said that giving birth to you was the most painful thing she could imagine: up until then, she'd never known a person could be in that kind of pain. She tells you that's why you don't have a brother, a sister. She was never going to go through that again.

*

You had this nightmare, back before your father died, and your nightmares took a more specific turn. You're inside the house and all the doors are gone, the windows. It's dark. If you reach a hand out in front of you, you can feel the rough wood walls, stroking splinters into your fingertips. You're trapped inside the walls.

This isn't that frightening to you. You've lived your whole life in this house: nothing about it could really scare you.

Before you can think much beyond that, though, the splinters in your fingertips grab tighter hold and it's pulling you, you're being thrust through the wall, arms splayed. You've never been in pain like this.

*

Your finger has a callus on it, right where the rifle trigger hits. You've had the callus since you were nine, ten, and your father took you out to the marshes. Mud on your coat, skin sliced up by the cattails. Your hands were destroyed, cuts and calluses and little moon-shaped bruises where you'd dug your fingernails into your palms.

Your mother washes your coat but she won't bandage your hands; she says everything you'll need is in the medicine cabinet but she can't stand the sight of blood. She says, you can go off and kill things with your father if you must but she's not going to have anything to do with it. Ask your father for help, if you need to.

You don't ask for help: you bandage them yourself, clumsy and painful. You get better at it, over time; the blisters turn hard and tough and you learn to fight your way through the marsh with your elbows, not your hands. You stop getting so nervous and tense, and the little moon bruises go away. You become really very good at this.

*

You come home from school one day and your mother is angry. This is before you realize that your mother is always angry, that your mother's entire personality is built around pretending she's not even a fraction as angry as she actually is.

You don’t know what's the matter: your mother is eternally mysterious to you, a half-erased word or a photograph taken just as the subject is turning away. She slams her knuckles into the wall.

You see her: it's a strangely primal thing, for your mother to do. It doesn't sit well with you.

Her hair flies; the wall crunches, or maybe her fist. You drive her to the hospital, fourteen and you've never driven before. You ground out twice and your mother's crying and her hand, it turns out, is broken.

The emergency room in a bottomless white, walls and linoleum and front counter. Your mother's hair is a flame. Her dress is black. You sit with her for hours, and then you sit without her for even more. You kick your feet against the chair legs, scuffing your shoes. She comes back out with her hand in a cast and the mouth in a thin line and she says, let's go, India, and you never talk about it again.

*

Your sit in the doorway, one foot outside the house, one foot in. The frame is hard against the points of your spine. You are of this house but you are not. You used to have a dream, a nightmare, that if you tried to run away the house would come after you, chasing you, dragging you back.

You don't have that dream anymore.

*

The bullet goes through the window. Charlie's head is half demolished, and the rifle kicks a bruise into the hollow of your shoulder. There is blood all over.

The bullet hole through the glass looks like a web, spun by the little capsule of metal and powder. You think about how your mother used to say, every pane of glass in these windows is original.

The boiler has had to be replaced six times but the window glass is old, thick and warped, and it could stand up to practically anything. You remember looking out these windows when you were a girl. How the outside world would look, blurred and distorted.

Your mother is looking at you like she doesn't even know you. You lower the rifle; you listen to the wind whistle through the little bit of destruction you brought down upon this house.

You killed your uncle. Family is life is violence. Blood is blood is—


End file.
